


you'll grow into your skin

by rojohbi



Category: Rick and Morty
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Character Study, Gen, Semi-Graphic Description of Mutilation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-13
Updated: 2017-03-13
Packaged: 2018-10-04 07:31:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10271480
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rojohbi/pseuds/rojohbi
Summary: It wasn’t denial, it was just ignoring reality until she really truly had to look it in the eye. Completely different.





	

**Author's Note:**

> this is, uh. this is a hefty thing
> 
> i really love beth and summer, and the reality is that in so many timelines death is inevitable. especially for those who toy with it
> 
> WARNING this does contain some descriptions of a mutilated body in two instances. its mostly medical terms but just be ready for that
> 
> song title and listening recommendation is [small bump by ed sheeran](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Npp7ZFOgpyM)
> 
> please send me r&m prompts my obsession is embarrassing

“It’s probably not even him, Beth! I mean, come on. It wouldn’t be the craziest thing to happen, right?” Jerry didn’t sound sure, but then again, she didn’t think Jerry had been sure about a single damn thing in his life. He went on, babbling aimlessly about all the shit their son and her dad got into on a regular basis. She tuned him out almost immediately, an acquired talent that had come only with years of marriage.

They were standing in a room of all gray tones, only a few seats in view that looked basically unused and a little dusty. There was a whole lot of waiting going on while the paperwork was shuffled and signed and Beth was somehow both fucking impatient and glad for the wait because it meant she didn’t have to confront what was waiting for her a floor below them. She was still a little tipsy, she thought - that had to be the explanation for the tight, queasy thing in her stomach that kept trying to shove wine and supermarket shrimp back up her throat. Beth was not an optimist, usually opted for the realist approach, but she was having trouble even thinking at the moment. Making a grounded assessment of the situation that could be considered positive or negative would require actually assessing the situation. Accepting where she was meant accepting what had happened - possibly happened - and she.

Beth could not do that yet.

It wasn’t denial, it was just ignoring reality until she really truly had to look it in the eye. Completely different.

 

\--

 

_“Mrs. Beth Smith?” The voice on the other end of the phone was rigid and official, and Beth prayed to any gods she could think of that she didn’t have to bail any of the idiots in her family out of jail again. They just didn’t have the funds to keep playing this game - let alone if it was some sort of alien prison. How the hell was she supposed to get them out of alien prison?_

_“That would be me, yes. How can I help you?” Tucking the phone between her cheek and shoulder, Beth went back to washing her wine glass. She just let the warm water skim over her fingers, vinot pulling a thin film over her mind and making the running water feel much more comforting than it really should have been. Everything hit a few moments too late - she only realized she’d missed what the man on the phone told her when he prompted her again, a curious but unsurprised ‘ma’am?’ bringing her back to the world of real things and real people telling her things on the telephone. “Sorry, could you repeat that for me?”_

 

\--

 

Paperwork finally finished and dealt with, Beth and Jerry were led downstairs. Jerry had shut his trap the second they started leading them past the thick door leading to the stairwell. It was almost the opposite of relieving, since if Jerry was taking it seriously it meant more, meant something different. It meant something solid and realistic, something she’d have to sign papers for and deal with the repercussions for. Beth was scared - she could admit that to herself, mostly because she was a little drunk but that wasn’t it, really, was it?

Her family was one of the few things she could actually feel things for, things other than bitter resentment and the want for escape. Summer and Morty were her reason for living, her reason for pushing on past the fog of alcohol to actually keep walking. She wasn’t perfect. Beth knew she wasn’t a perfect mom, Jesus Christ, she wasn’t that self-absorbed. She wasn’t even a good mom. That was obvious. Her mother didn’t really -

Her mother. Ha. Didn’t matter anymore, did it? Just her dad and her husband and her kids.

Her kids.

Her two - two of them, two children, an older sister and a younger brother. Should they have only had the one? Would that have landed her somewhere other than a shitty, musty-smelling stairway with her heart on overdrive? Or would she be in the same place but a completely different position, Summer’s vivid hair peeking from around the corner, flanked by silver and white.

Beth Smith loved her kids, okay? She did. Summer wasn’t supposed to happen and Morty was a post-emptive attempt at grasping happiness via forced unconditional love, but. She could feel real, honest, human devotion and it was all-encompassing and all-consuming and if her dad wasn’t already dead she would fucking kill him, she would tear him apart for this, for the way her heart was slowly splitting as she came around the corner and saw a short-for-its-age fourteen year-old body under a white sheet. Slightly misshapen, but Beth was hoping for the sake of the room’s state of cleanliness that it was only due to the way the sheet was falling against her son’s (probably, but still only maybe, please God maybe) still form.

 

\--

 

_“Mrs. Smith, we believe that we found your son’s body yesterday afternoon. He was alone in the wreckage of a - “_

_“A space ship looking thing, right? Kind of a piece of shit?” Beth was staring at the curving patterns in the wood cabinets, unmoving, and she had not felt herself shatter the wine glass but there was something therapeutic about the way it sort of felt like she’d stuck her hand in a blender._

_“Uh. Yes, ma’am. That would be the one. We need you or your husband to come and confirm the body whenever you’re able.”_

_The hand stuck full of glass shards was bleeding slowly into the sink, and her other hand still held the sponge dripping soap suds and water onto the floor. Beth breathed in, breathed out, and swallowed the scream building in her throat as it was rude for the undeserving messenger. She dug out a set of post-it notes from the junk drawer and rinsed off her sudsy hand, letting the other bleed all over the counter as a macabre and sort of sticky reminder that she was still alive, heart still pumping, but ultimately fallible._

_“Yes, of course. Of course you do. Give me the address now and we’ll be over once my husband gets home.”_

 

\--

 

The coroner - was that who it was? Morgue assistant, maybe? Beth had no damn clue - folded down the sheet as they got to the side of the gurney, pulling it down to the middle of the form it had been previously hiding. From all the movies, Beth thought she’d just have to look at his face and get it over with, but. Maybe they had to show more when the face was so difficult to recognize.

Beth closed her eyes slowly, breathed slowly, and turned on the medical major inside of her before she looked at the body again.

The intact eye was closed peacefully, like he was sleeping, but the other half of the face was partially caved in. An impact near the ocular cavity shattering the surrounding bone, the zygomatic basically gone for how pulverized it was in the crash. The jaw wasn’t unhinged, per se, but the mandible had shifted and the coronoid process was jutting awkwardly against what was left intact of the skin of the cheek. The right upper half of his face was just. It didn’t have structure anymore, hairline just scar tissue and haphazardly replaced skin with muscle peeking through the edges. She could see parts of the skin where they might’ve moved or taken out some protruding bone to scare the couple less.

Doctor mode was easier than parent mode. She hadn’t called him what what they all knew he was, yet. Jerry was vomiting into a trash can placed conveniently near them, loud and distracting. Beth grit her teeth together to keep herself from snapping at him to shut the hell up. She was a medical student, she had seen ugly things. She’d seen based heads and shattered bones and fractures through the parts of the body that keep it all together. She’d seen the way it all fell apart.

She couldn’t look away from the little patch of perfect skin, acne scars and the faintest of freckles dusted under stunted eyelashes. Beth had been one of those moms that just stared at their babies, not in adoration or anything nearly as specific, but abject curiosity. Morty was an ugly baby, awkward and slow to grow, and Beth had loved it. She’d loved watching the drastic change, the shift to a half-assed attempt at handsome that could’ve become something interesting as Morty went through high school and puberty and all that soul-searching bullshit you do while high in the middle of nowhere with two good friends and no sense of purpose. There were rituals and traditions that would have turned him into a man, and if she knew a damn thing about her son, it would’ve turned him into a good man. A good person.

She reached out gingerly, fingers brushing just the barest touch over Morty’s cool skin. It hurt - her hand was still wrapped and bandaged from shattering the wine glass. But it was grounding, like one final way she could connect to the limpid thing below her that was a grotesque and poor imitation of her awkward, stupid, charming son.

Oh, God. Beth swallowed a little vomit and a few tears and she tried not to break the whole way, at least for the moment.

“Yeah, that’s. That’s Morty. That’s my son.”

“Our son. That’s our son, Beth, remember? Husband?”

“Shut up, Jerry.”

“Our son is-”

“Jerry, shut your goddamn mouth!” Beth burst, then, a mess of tears and blood as she clenched her hands and felt the cuts in her skin split again, warm and seeping. “I fucking know! He’s dead, thank you, _sweetie_. My dad fucking killed our son, like you’ve been saying would happened since he came back. Are you happy now, Jerry? Isn’t it nice to be right?”

She stormed back upstairs, tripping twice and grunting through the pain as she landed on her hands.

What a fucking Wednesday.

 

\--

 

“I had to get a cab home.”

Beth cracked open one eye, the dark room lit by the hallway light creeping in past Jerry’s silhouette in the doorway. “Uh huh,” she supplied, staring at - well, probably Jerry. Everything was spinning in this nice, whirling pattern that made her want to be sick. She wished she could. It hadn’t really happened yet, but that tight thing in her stomach had turned into lead, seeping into her blood and brain and draining her of everything but the vivid color of wine spilled on the comforter and Summer’s hair as she walked out of the room, having given up on trying to get her mother to tell her what had happened.

Slowly, through her mind, Beth considered that she’d been home for hours and Jerry must have been somewhere. She didn’t really care where. Maybe he’d been cheating on her. That pulled a gurgling laugh out of her, and it kept going, getting funnier and funnier as she forgot more and more about what she was laughing at.

Jerry was picking up something, she noticed. She watched him, pulling another mouthful of wine from the bottle in her hand. They were - oh. They were the boxes and bottles she’d already gone through, basically tapping all the wine she had in the house. Jerry was just. Just dealing with it. Just trucking along. She admired that, weirdly enough, her idiot husband and his ability to just keep going forward no matter what happened. He never blamed himself for a mother gone, a father gone, a son’s blood on his hands.

Ooh, blood. Beth looked at her hand, the bandages picked off and the scabs half-formed, blood smeared across her entire hand and the comforter and her nice slacks. “Whoops,” she mumbled, causing Jerry to look over.

“Jesus, Beth.” He sighed, reaching over her, and she stopped him but wrapping her arms around his wrist and holding his palm to her cheek. Jerry stared at her, unsure what to do and a little disgusted by the smear of blood she got on his skin. Beth just laid there, though, breathing through her nose and pressing her cheek into Jerry’s hand like she could put herself back together like that, like maybe loving things was enough and that could fix her whole world. Maybe it would bring her family back, her and Jerry’s parents and her kids and her husband sitting splayed around the living room like Christmas but so much better, no blood raining from the sky and no giant Santas clouding the nation.

Maybe she could grow from this.

Beth fell asleep covered in blood and wine as Jerry brushed tears from her face, sighing softly into the dark and silent bedroom.

 

 

* * *

 

**2 Years Later**

 

“Of course I know your birthday, Summer, I was there.” Beth snorted, sipping the overpriced and frankly average coffee she’d ordered. In the months after Morty’s death, they’d tried to put the pieces back together. But Rick had never appeared again, and Beth kept looking for him and her son in the bottom of a bottle, and somehow she got left behind in the chaos. Summer and Jerry moved on, and after a year Jerry left her (ha! Who’d have ever thought he’d find the balls) and took their daughter to a nice apartment complex where she could go to a new school and cope in their own ways.

Beth, however, did not cope any better alone than she did with help.

She’d ended up in AA meetings, and then rehab, and now she sipped coffee and distinctly didn’t think about having a glass or two of something sweet and strong to deal with seeing her daughter for their usual meetups. Beth most likely could’ve gotten partial custody, but - she hadn’t -

It wasn’t that she hadn’t wanted it. It was that she hadn’t thought it would be good for any of them.

“You weren’t there, though, so obviously not.” Summer was sitting across from her with some kind of very nice-smelling tea untouched on the table, arms crossed and eyes narrowed. She was wearing a very nice blouse. Beth wondered how she’d afforded it, if Jerry was still advertising.

Beth ran a thumb over the scars on her hand, biting her tongue and trying very hard to pretend she was a good person long enough for someone else to believe it. It was a useless act with her daughter, someone who’d seen the worst and decided it wasn’t worth saving, but if she didn’t try she was admitting defeat and Beth did not fucking do that. She didn’t.

She would not see the day that she became her father, when all she’d ever really wanted to be was half as good as her poor fucking mother.

“I - Shit. I’m sorry, Summer. I don’t know why I ever thought I could raise a person well, let alone someone like you.” Summer went rigid, clearly offended, but Beth kept going, watching her own scar-riddled fingers dragging around the rim of her coffee lazily. “You’re stubborn and strong, and you know your morals because you chose them. You’re smart as hell and you’ve never let anyone think any differently of you - like me, you got that from me, but. But, uh.”

Summer no longer looked offended. She looked a little hurt, and a little sad, and a lot like she was hanging on every word that Beth was giving her. Beth took a deep breath and kept trucking.

“You care about yourself, and other people. And it makes you a good person, Summer. You’re good because you can be bad but you feel bad for it and you try to grow from there. You’re such a- shit. Shit, shit, sorry.” Beth laughed, wet and breathless, as she wiped her face on her sleeve to keep the tears from coming. She hated this. She missed her family. She didn’t want to be alone anymore. But more than anything, Beth didn’t want Summer to turn into her.

“No matter what you do, Summer, do not let the failings of your parents - your parent.” Deep breath. “Me, alright. Me. Don’t let my failings be any part of who you are becoming other than a warning, okay?” Beth sniffled, staring harder at her coffee, like it could tell her all the right things to say to make sure her one surviving child didn’t hate her. “Rick changed me. Don’t let me hurt you like that.”

When she looked up, Summer was a mess of snot and tears and mascara. Beth could see that she still wore a few shades too dark of foundation, and felt something like fondness blossom in her chest.

“Mom, you know I’ve never hated you for any of this, right?” Beth sucked in a breath, looking in confusion at her nineteen year-old daughter and seeing all the things she wished she had been as a young woman. “All I ever wanted was for all of us to learn how to be people again. We’re all fucked up, we know that. Dad is too. Rick is, and so was Morty. We’re all sorts of fucked up. We just have to be healed enough to be fucked up together, y’know?”

Beth reached across the table, her scarred hand intertwining with her daughter’s baby-soft one. Her nails were painted like shit, a mottled attempt at baby pink. She’d have to paint them for her sometime. That blossoming thing in her chest had burst into bloom, working through her bloodstream, and it felt like it was bringing her back to life.

You can only live so long for other people. But you can live with other people for the rest of your life, and you can only grow from that.

“So long as we’re the right kinds of fucked up.” Beth smiled, and when her daughter smiled right back, wide a real and crooked, she thought that maybe being a good person was nothing compared to being a better one.

“Yeah. All the right kinds of fucked up.”

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr at [rojohbi](http://www.rojohbi.tumblr.com)


End file.
